Critic Reviews

An impossibly enjoyable live-action cartoon that plays on our real-life anxieties about vengeful cadres of foreign radicals blowing up people - and places.

Brash, brutal, and simplistic in equal measure, it’s a retrograde work that, for better and worse, delivers its old-school mayhem with punishing precision and unrepentant glee.

As action-thrillers go, this one provides what the previews tease. Maybe that’s enough for an evening’s mindless, throw-away entertainment, but I can’t help but be disappointed that the filmmakers couldn’t have brought something more inventive to a genre that too often relies on worn-out tropes.

The film is a popcorn-crowd pleaser, but a “yippee ki-yay” or two away from something more memorable.

It’s all so overly macho that it plays like a camp pleasure-cruise.

While not nearly as elaborate, nor as visually sophisticated as the last Mission: Impossible outing or the most recent Bonds, London Has Fallen is actually more plausible at its core, if not in its details, which is partly why it succeeds in laying claim to an audience's attention for the entirety of its swift running time.

Like its predecessor, the film is content to dumbly relish in the inanity of Mike's rampage.

The action is pumped up. The destruction is extreme. The whole thing is absurd.

The new sequel, London Has Fallen, implausibly ups its predecessor’s stakes to "Die Hard in the City of London." Unfortunately, widening the scope this dramatically causes the entire fragile action-movie axis to spin wildly out of control.

There is some surreal fun at the beginning as everything collapses.... But then it’s the same thing over again.